For most people, failure feels like a colossal mistake, potentially leading to the demise of a critical component of your life. Chances are something unforeseen negatively affected your situation, or maybe you didn’t recognize something that was critically important. The reality is that failure simply means that you tried something that didn’t work. Thomas Edison understood failure is not necessarily a negative outcome, when he stated, “I haven’t failed I just found 10,000 ways that don’t work”.

A year after I graduated from college I decided to start a business. My goal was to become a millionaire by age 30. I found a maintenance person at my apartment complex that could build a house from the ground up and do every trade himself.…